BOOK5 alize us? In particular, how are wayward but diligent sons to mourn their lost fathers-the immigrants and refugees, the enraged lawgivers? This is an espe- cially powerful question for those of us who have a voluntary relationship to reli- gion, a relationship that is not automati- cally determined. Lucky are the whole- hearted believers. Lucky are the ones who have never known an inconsolable grief: who haven't been orphaned, who haven't yet been forced to enact what Freud called "the work of mourning." Wieseltier soon recognizes that he knows almost nothing about the ardu- ous daily ritual that he is performing with such unexpected diligence, and he longs to find out more about it. "Sorrow, feed me," he writes, and it does. He stands before a wall of books and experi- ences the sheer immensity-the human plenitude-of Jewish learning. He turns to these old texts, to rabbinical commen- taries from six hundred and seven hun- dred years ago, with such fervor that the quest itself becomes invigorating. As he puts it, "A season of sorrow became a season of soul-renovation." Love, for Jews, is nothing if not bookish. Yet there is nothing cerebral about Wieseltier's book. He is no disinterested scholar arranging and systematizing his texts. ("I was fixed in my obligation," he writes, "but I was a rover in my tradition.") He throws himself into the old wisdom texts with a headlong desperation. He is starved and riven, he is (the phrase is Ruskin's) "unhinged by grief:" He feels what he calls "the charisma of learning." The books are peonies closed and clenched with promise. He turns to them for guid- ance, and they do not disappoint him. Some friends open a teahouse near Wieseltier's shul, and he repairs there daily to read the commentaries, to track down "the origins and the meanings" of the mourner's Kaddish (it seems to have originated in the thirteenth century; dur- ing the time of the Crusades), to rehearse the great debates surrounding it. Friends send him obscure books; the texts he needs bloom suddenly to hand; he feels "the angel of bibliography" guiding his way. At first, he worries that his mourn- ing will interfere with his life, but soon he is concerned because the rest of his life keeps interfering with his mourning. "Kaddish" is an urgent spiritual jour- nal, a book of commentaries, a summary of findings. Wiesel tier intersperses his reading with observations about his observance, about his fellow-mourners, about the small band of the faithful he has joined. He is beset by doubts about what he is doing as he moves between study and prayer, which he calls "the dif- ference between thinking and feeling." He is sometimes exhausted, sometimes exalted by prayer, but he seems always vivified by study: "Back and forth from my desk to my shelves, ten, twenty; thirty times a day. . . The sweet savor rises from the pages. A delirium of study." Wieseltier becomes what Wallace Stevens calls "the scholar of one candle." He looks down at his Hebrew texts and scents "words as spices, words as per- fumes." He looks up and feels "the rustle of being." He has an aphoristic intelli- gence, and in a sense he is taking his place in a line of philosophers which runs from Pascal to Nietzsche and on to E. M. Cioran. "The history of Jewish civilization is the history of what can be accomplished in a ruin," he writes, and, "Tradition is not reproduced. It is thrown and it is caught. It lives a long time in the air." He delivers a special blow to the author of the idea that God is dead: When Nietzsche lost his faith, he concluded that God is dead. This is not critical thinking. This is narcissism. I understand the idea that if God exists, then you must believe in Him. I do not understand the idea that if you do not believe in Him, then God must not exist. Wieseltier is a modern skeptic who keeps siding with old sources-who longs to be infected by their dimensions, to feel their amplitudes. He seeks the sublime, which Longinus calls our join- ing with the great. He comes to feel that the mourner's Kaddish is tnùy the "or- phan's" Kaddish. Interpreting the scrip- tural authority Ovadiah, he writes: The son does not re_quest that hls father be granted a good fate. The son demonstrates why his father deserves to be granted a good fate. The son is not the advocate, the son is the evidence: I am the evidence! Examine me and forgive him. As this "diligent and doubting son" repeats phrases from the Kaddish like a mantra, an ancient magnificence stirs in the text, and his brokenheartedness is balanced by his exhilaration. "He taught me to be here," he writes of his father, "and here I am." . 101 BRIEFLY NOTED KAATERSKILL FALLs, by Allegra Goodman (Dial; $23.95). Goodman, the author of two collections of stories, is a writer of uncommon clarity and grace. In this, her first novel, the primary subject is the in- terlocking lives of a sect of Orthodox Jews who winter in Washington Heights and summer in upstate New York-among them Elizabeth, a mother of five who reads Tolstoy and Austen, and Jeremy, the Kir- shner rabbi's doubting son. Goodman's handling of incident is masterly; even more remarkable is the way she makes use of her considerable gifts to illuminate, through action, the relationship between faith and free will. My YEAR IN THE No-MAN'S-BAY, by Peter Handke, translated from the German by Krishna Winston (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30). Handke's "excessive consciousness" is what sustains an epic paean to the banlieu the "in-between spaces" of the Seine hills surrounding Paris. It is in this marginalized locale, inhabited by toads, muskrats, and the blue-collar regulars at the Bar des Voyageurs, that the narrator, an Austrian named Gregor Keuschnig, has installed himself to write. Keuschnig's exhaustively detailed meditation on the seemingly "unwinnable struggle" to trans- form the visible into the readable is leav- ened by his exposés of nameless friends and his estranged wife ("the Singer," "the Reader," "the woman from Catalonia") and his ceaseless wonder at his new sur- roundings: the desolation of a railway sta- tion, the flesh of a cèpe mushroom. N. C. WYETH: A BIOGRAPHY, by David Michaelis (Knopf; $40). In N. C. Wyeth's art, Robert Frost noted the "strong bent toward the near, the homely, and the Amer- ican," and in this dramatic biography a whole era of great and undeniably romantic American illustration is summoned up and represented. Michaelis's book, based on unrestricted access to family papers and candid interviews with family members, explores not only the destiny of a fero- ciously disciplined and conflicted patriarch but the lives of four generations of an American artistic dynasty. Wyeth's own tale proves to be as extravagant and mem- orable as the children's classics he so fa- mously illustrated. THE ENGRAFTED WORD, by Karl Kirchwey (Holt; $23). In his third collection of poems, Kirchwey skillfully mingles images of the ancient world with those of the modern, uncovering in antiquity an in- timate present. Without straining, he can bring an episode from the Peloponnesian War to bear on a sonogram of his son, or find in the Gospel of Matthew a forecast of the boy's uncertain future, one in which "He will have nowhere / to lay his head, no matter how he builds." The Prix de Rome allowed Kirchwey a year to live and travel among the ruins, which, as he ren- ders them here in classically elegant forms, seem to be his heart's natural habitat.